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Thursday, September 27, 2012

I noticed a couple of days ago that Mark Rittman's much-awaited book, Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Developers Guide, has now started shipping. It's been in the works for a few years, and I first heard about it from Mark in 2006, so yes - it's been in the works for many years. The reasons for the time it's taken are many, but the good news is that it is now available, and knowing Mark's extensive experience in business intelligence in general and with Oracle's business intelligence and data warehousing product portfolio, this should prove to be very helpful to BI professionals. I am reading it (courtesy Mark and Betty at McGraw-Hill - yes, disclosure) even as we speak - no, wait, that's a terrible cliche to use. Scratch that. I am reading the book, and I will try and put up initial impressions next week. In the meantime, go check the book out. Take note that this is a massive 1000+ page book, so it's not exactly a Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sort of a bedside read.

If you get the e-book version, I gather it's got some additional and more recently updated material on Trellis visualizations as well as Exalytics and the 11.1.1.6.2BP1 release.

So, if you are interested in getting your hands on an e-book version of this book, please take a look at this tweet, https://twitter.com/oracle_biee/status/250276120031813632, and reply to the tweet with a comment on why you would like this book. The contest will remain open for 10 days, and at the end of the 10 days, two people will be selected to receive the book.

Monday, September 10, 2012

To continue from an earlier post of mine (Oracle BI Mobile HD App - 2), I will look at other ways of interacting with data on views. To recap, in that post, which would be , I talked about the support for tooltips via a tap gesture and draggable tooltips via the tap-and-drag gesture.

In this post, let us take a brief look at some of the other interactions available on views like the Table and Pivot and Trellis (yes, I used a conjunction where a comma should have been).

When interacting with a Pivot View, for instance, you can use the mouse right-click to view the interactions available. The section, Right-Click Menu for Tables, Pivot Tables, and Trellises, from the "Oracle® Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition" doc guide says this about right-click interactions:

"The interactions that are available when you right-click in a table, pivot table, or trellis depend on:

The type of data view

The data that you have selected data. When you right-click a:

Column heading, the available right-click interactions are related to that column, for example, Exclude column or Show Subtotal.

Member, the available right-click interactions are related to that member, for example, Expand and Create Group. Interactions that are related to the column that contains the member are also available.

Whether you are working in design mode (for example, in the Analysis editor), in a dashboard, or in run-time mode"

More than thirty interactions are available, and these are of great value to Dashboard users, who have greater ways to analyze their data.

Right-click interactions in a Pivot View

These right-click interactions are available via the tap-and-hold gesture in the BI Mobile app. Therefore, if you were to tap-and-hold the "2009" value in the pivot view below, a menu is displayed that contains the same interactions as in the desktop browser mode.

Similarly, if you were to right-click the a value on the left-edge of the Pivot View, you get an even richer array of interaction options, including multi-dimensional analysis options like "Keep Only", "Remove", "Keep Only Related", and more. Since these options could get numerous, these are organized into sub-menus; so if you tap the "Sort" option, you would get options like "Sort Ascending", "Sort Descending", "Add Ascending Sort", "Sort Descending Sort", "Clear All Sorts".

And what about Table views? Since you cannot really do any pivoting, since this is a Table view and not a Pivot view that we are talking about, the choice of interactions is necessarily limited. However, you can choose to exclude this column from your view, or move this column to the Section or Page edge, which can come in handy if you need to look at a subset of your data.

The Trellis View is a new view in the 11.1.1.6.2BP1 release, so let's spend a minute talking about the good Trellis view also. Many, but not all, of the interactions you saw in the Pivot View are also available for the Trellis view, as can be seen in the screenshot below. Again, the tap-and-hold gesture is what is needed.

I apologize for the brevity of this post, but I struggle with some other tasks at work, but I promise a longer post very soon.

Take care, and have a good week.Abhinav10 Sep 2012, Bangalore

Previous Posts on the Oracle BI EE 11.1.1.6.2BP1 Release: (or simply use this tag: 11.1.1.6.2BP1 to find all posts for this release)